Look what we discovered when we lifted the carpets – Our house renovation

1930s house renovation

14 Aug

Anyone who's ever lived in a fixer upper will know of that impatience you feel to lift up all the carpets in the house the moment you move in, too eager to see whether the wooden floor boards are salvageable or not.

Well I was no different. The day we moved in I swear there wasn't a corner of carpet left unturned.

What is under carpet in our MASTER BEDROOM

Throughout the house there's softwood pine floorboards in every room. You have to dig pretty deep through layers of carpet and lino in some of them but they're pristine condition having been covered for all these years.

The wood is a little too soft for high traffic rooms so I'm not sure we'll have bare floorboards like our old flat, but I'm sure we'll decide soon enough.

Anyway, upstairs in the master bedroom we had a workman round who needed to access the floorboards under the bay.

When he lifted the crumbling shag pile carpet, look what he found...

A layer of newspaper used as underlay dating back to 1938, right before WW2 broke out.

The workman called Neil up to see it all, I wasn't at home at the time – and they couldn't believe how well preserved all the paper is.

Apparently it was a fairly common thing to do back in the 30s, put a layer of paper down before laying a carpet.

See that "Did you MACLEAN your teeth today daisy?" advert? I plan to frame it in our bathroom.

What a find, eh! :-)

UPDATE 2021

Neil here! So I finally found the time to have another look through the newspapers and couldn’t wait to show you some of the best bits so I photographed them in high quality. The biggest surprise, as my memory failed me, was just how many papers we had - a real time capsule! A big heavy pile of all sorts of papers.

There are quite a few different papers, mostly The Herald but also The Star, The People, The Evening News, Reynolds News, News Chronicle and Brighton’s local newspaper The Argus. They all ranged from 1936 to 1938 but most were from the summer of 1938 (presumably when our house was being carpeted). It looks like they were experiencing a swelteringly hot summer.

Of course, what makes these papers so poignant is the knowledge that in just over 12 months time from the publish date, these people were about to see the start of the biggest conflict in modern history. But amongst all of the foreboding signs of the Second World War building, it’s simply enthralling to get a glimpse into the way of life of the UK in the 1930s, in the exact time that our house was being built, and how different (and similar actually) it really was back then.

If you’re a history buff or you’re just interested in checking out this bit of history here’s a zip file of the 33 pages I shot in high quality . If you’re reusing the photos on the web please credit and link to our website Fifi McGee.

Here are some of my favourite bits: